Generate

Wealth

Generating Brand Equity

OUR ROLE

Brand strategy

Brand identity

Creative direction

Visual design

Copywriting

PARTNERS

Dottystyle

A small yet stalwart new business, personal financial advice firm Generate Wealth was seeking a brand that would assert its distinct character and offerings, yet align with its parent company, Generate.

BRAND TEXT ANIMATION

ABOUT GENERATE WEALTH

Generate Wealth is a boutique financial advice firm based in Sydney, Australia. With its staff having provided expert planning and guidance for twenty years, it serves as the personal coach and confidant of its clients, helping them through the early stages of their careers, through to senior and executive positions and beyond.

CATALYST

Generate Wealth was created in late 2017, branching off to extend the growth of its parent company, Generate. The new business sought a brand that would both align with Generate – thereby carrying over its heritage of respectability and value – yet appeal in a novel way to their specific market of high net worth individuals.

CONCEPT

As applies to all our client projects, it was imperative that we started with a firm understanding of the market positioning of Generate Wealth, and distilling through our Brand Canvas process, what the brand stands for.

This distillation we anointed with the phrase: Carpe Futura, or Seize the Future – a twist on the well-known, carpe diem. The phrase was a clear expression of Generate Wealth’s spirit, capturing how the brand encourages its clients to focus on their core financial goals over the long term.

The phrase also resonates with the company’s own rooted philosophy of loyalty and commitment – a point of difference against the heftier-sized competition. Client and staff relationships are forged with strong, lasting bonds; consultations don’t take place over a matter of hours, with superficial solutions dished out at the end. Instead, the company offers decades – even lifetimes – of continual improvement for whoever they work with, providing ongoing learning opportunities and unfailing support.

From the ideas and values contained in the essence of Carpe Futura we investigated a series of conceptual directions, before landing on the idea of a single, dynamic line. It represents, we discovered, several aspects of the brand: a path, a journey, a guide or the passage of time. The continuity of the line demonstrates that everything in a life is related: the decisions you make now will affect your future, and, with the right guidance, those decisions can have a compounding, positive effect.

Taking this core design element, we translated it across Generate Wealth’s online and digital presence through custom visual graphics and layouts to ensure a coherent brand identity.

RESULTS

Brandmark

The brandmark was designed to be flexible and adaptable across different contexts, able to change its colour and form depending on the situation.

Colour

One of the challenges identified for Generate Wealth was the danger of being overlooked. Despite the eminence of its parent company, as a financial provider it nonetheless risked being perceived as a completely new startup.

To overcome this succinctly, we created a bold, fresh palette. Rather than cloaking the brand in the imitation colours of blues, greens and greys that coat the financial planning brandscape, we put forward a not-so-common (and hence noticeable) choice: purple. A deep, dignified violet was applied as a staple background colour, where a lighter and more energetic violet hue was used for hyperlinks, content blocks, outlines and linear graphics.

Additionally These colour values complemented Generate’s primary palette of Generate Blue and Citrus. Violet in particular sits at the visual midpoint on a colour wheel between the two Generate colours, forming a harmonious spectrum.

Graphics

In keeping with the brand’s concept of a single line to represent time and movement, all graphics designed for Generate Wealth were created with just one line (or, at least, give the illusion of such). This line formed the building block for a unique icon set, typographic images for marketing and branding purposes, and a more complex animation that features just below the fold on the website’s home page.

To mitigate the widely-held impression that finance is ‘boring’, we crafted graphics so that they appeared accessible, simple and relatable. They intend to evoke a feeling of warmth, rather than make the viewer think: ‘I never want to think about insurance/investment/wills again’.

The animation in particular contains a wry sense of humour: a seated, moustachioed and rather serious looking gent is whisked away from a boring office desk to a tropical setting. Seemingly effortlessly, the man himself does not move while all this change occurs around him – only giving a very small grin when a cocktail appears before him at the end.

RESULTS

The Generate Wealth brand has been successfully rolled out across its website, email signatures and LinkedIn, its sole social media platform. The company is also incorporating it across various other applications, including posters, business cards, stationery, and other marketing collateral as needed.